Thank you for writing this, and the post before. As a reader it is one of my ultimate frustrations that we never got to read the finished version of The Last Tycoon, but perhaps him completing such a mature work would have undone the meaning of the longer real life work he was the protagonist of, ‘The Life of F Scott Fitzgerald’. So much of his life expresses an idea of America - beautiful, glamorous, ungraspable and ultimately ruinous for those who reach for it - that for him to have lived out his days in a second act as a clean former alcoholic writing great fiction in LA might have somehow robbed us of the intertextual Uber Novel he was living and the meanings we’re all still reading into it. I don’t want art to break all of the people who make it, but somehow his life and the way it played out has a meaning that sits as a counterpoint and compliment to his fiction. We’re still trying to fill the silences left by his voice and way of seeing, and suspect because of this unfinished work we always will be.
Final point: I’m interested in the idea of Stahr as the unity that runs everything. This vision of the ‘creative conductor’ who sits at the meeting of commerce and creativity lives in founders like Steve Jobs, show runners like Vince Gilligan, Shonda Rimes, Ryan Murphy, directors like Kubrick who are an ‘ideas and taste machine”, but it does run counter to the DAO model and community decision making that people are experimenting with right now. In my opinion to create is to decide and to decide is to lead, and whilst we might have more sophisticated means of organising collective creative endeavours (of which Hollywood then and now is an excellent example) you still need someone making the calls. I was listening to this conversation between Dwarkesh Patel and Nadia Asparouhova and she makes a similar point about who actually makes creative endeavours great in a far more sophisticated way.
Thank you for writing this, and the post before. As a reader it is one of my ultimate frustrations that we never got to read the finished version of The Last Tycoon, but perhaps him completing such a mature work would have undone the meaning of the longer real life work he was the protagonist of, ‘The Life of F Scott Fitzgerald’. So much of his life expresses an idea of America - beautiful, glamorous, ungraspable and ultimately ruinous for those who reach for it - that for him to have lived out his days in a second act as a clean former alcoholic writing great fiction in LA might have somehow robbed us of the intertextual Uber Novel he was living and the meanings we’re all still reading into it. I don’t want art to break all of the people who make it, but somehow his life and the way it played out has a meaning that sits as a counterpoint and compliment to his fiction. We’re still trying to fill the silences left by his voice and way of seeing, and suspect because of this unfinished work we always will be.
Final point: I’m interested in the idea of Stahr as the unity that runs everything. This vision of the ‘creative conductor’ who sits at the meeting of commerce and creativity lives in founders like Steve Jobs, show runners like Vince Gilligan, Shonda Rimes, Ryan Murphy, directors like Kubrick who are an ‘ideas and taste machine”, but it does run counter to the DAO model and community decision making that people are experimenting with right now. In my opinion to create is to decide and to decide is to lead, and whilst we might have more sophisticated means of organising collective creative endeavours (of which Hollywood then and now is an excellent example) you still need someone making the calls. I was listening to this conversation between Dwarkesh Patel and Nadia Asparouhova and she makes a similar point about who actually makes creative endeavours great in a far more sophisticated way.
https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/nadia-asparouhova#details